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Lobster Croquettes
Chop very fine about two pounds of lobsters, one egg, salt and pepper, and two tablespoonfuls of butter; cook the butter and flour together; to it add a very small teacup of cream, also lobster and seasoning; the egg should be well beaten and added while the ingredients are hot. One good half tablespoonful of flour is sufficient to mix with the cream. Set in a cool place, then shape, and dip in beaten egg, roll in cracker crumbs and fry in hot lard.
Veal, beef, mutton, lamb, and turkey may be prepared the same as you would chicken croquettes.
A very thin panada binds this mixture, so the chilling step is what makes it work at all. Read the flour quantity carefully before you begin.
- The binder is the hingeHalf a tablespoon of flour to a teacup of cream will not hold two pounds of lobster together. Modern croquette practice uses a stiff panada — roughly 3 tablespoons each butter and flour cooked to a paste, then about 1 cup of cream, thickened until it pulls away from the pan — for that much meat.
- "Two pounds of lobsters"Ambiguous as written. If it means whole lobsters in the shell you will get well under a pound of meat, perhaps 6-10 oz; if it means picked meat, it is a large batch. The recipe gives no way to decide, though the quantity of butter and the shaping and frying suit picked meat better than half a pound would.
- A very small teacupNineteenth-century teacup measures were not standardised, and are variously reckoned at between a half and three-quarters of a cup; the qualifier "very small" suggests the lower end, so about 1/2 cup. Cream here is best taken as heavy cream rather than half-and-half, which will thin the paste further.
- Adding the egg hotBeat the egg well and stream it into the hot mixture off the heat while stirring hard, or it will scramble in threads. The egg is a binder, not enrichment, so it matters that it disperses evenly.
- Chill properly"Set in a cool place" means genuinely cold and firm — at least two hours refrigerated, and overnight is better. Warm croquette paste bursts in the fat.
- FryingLard is still excellent for this and gives a clean, crisp shell; any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Hold the fat at 360-375F and fry in small batches for 2-3 minutes, until deep gold. The filling is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust.
- Cracker crumbsSoda or common crackers crushed fine, not seasoned crumbs. Dry them briefly in a low oven if they seem soft, and press them on firmly after the egg wash.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of lobster meat makes roughly 16 to 18 croquettes, enough for six to eight as a first course. Serve hot with lemon, or with a cream or tomato sauce as was usual in period service.
Croquettes were a fixture of American cookbooks from the 1870s through the 1920s, and they belong to the economical logic of the period kitchen: a small quantity of cooked meat or fish, extended with a thick white sauce, chilled, breaded and fried into something that looked like more than it was. This is a technique rather than a single dish, which is exactly what the closing sentence admits when it hands the reader veal, beef, mutton, lamb and turkey as interchangeable substitutes. Lobster held a peculiar double status at the time: cheap and abundant along the northeastern coast, and increasingly fashionable inland once canned and iced rail shipment made it available, so a lobster croquette could read as either thrift or luxury depending on where the cook was standing. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form reached American tables through the French-influenced service that dominated hotel and company cooking in the late nineteenth century.